When Democrats ignored Russ Feingold's motion to censure the President,
they provided more evidence that there is no visible national strategy
to end the war and bring the troops home.

March 23, 2006

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My local town of Eureka in northwest California had a pretty good peace rally on March 18, to mark the third anniversary of the US attack on Iraq. They’ve put them on every year, including a big one just before the war started. An ad hoc local group called Communities for Peace worked for eight weeks and, with the help of Veterans for Peace, pulled 2,000 people into the municipal auditorium on F Street. There were plenty of young people, and the crowd sat a bit restlessly through three speeches before hitting the streets. There were four marching bands.

They headed down to the square in Old Town, next to the rehabbed waterfront, where I was the designated final speaker. I cheered them all up by telling them no one present should ever look in the mirror and tell themselves they’re not smart enough to run the country. The country is being run by morons.

I read out some of the more spectacular moron predictions from 2003, finishing up with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, “We’re all neocons now,” and Vanity Fair‘s answer to Clausewitz, Christopher Hitchens: “This will be no war–there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention…. The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling…. It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on.”

I told them that two out of three Americans now oppose the war. The problem is not in the heartland. The problem is at the national level. There is no visible national strategy to end the war and bring the troops home. I attribute this in considerable part to the disastrous fealty to the Democrats of the leadership of some of the big organizations. This explains why United for Peace and Justice, for example, was missing in action for most of 2004. It didn’t want to rock the Kerry boat, even as Capt. Kerry was drilling holes in its hull.

Then I read to the crowd Dana Milbank’s account in the Washington Post of how Russ Feingold’s Senate colleagues have reacted to his motion of censure of a President who has used the Bill of Rights to clean up after his dog.

Barack Obama of Illinois: “I haven’t read it.”

John Kerry of Massachusetts: “I really can’t [comment] right now.”

Hillary Clinton of New York rushed past reporters shaking her head, then trying to hide behind the 4’11” Barbara Mikulski.

Charles Schumer of New York, who would normally run over his grandmother to get to a microphone: “I’m not going to comment.”

Chris Dodd of Connecticut: “Most of us feel at best it’s premature. I don’t think anyone can say with any certainty at this juncture that what happened [the NSA’s eavesdropping] is illegal.”

Even while I was speaking, the weekend news shows were detailing the latest campaign plan of the Congressional Democrats. It’s called “Real Security.” And no, “security” here doesn’t mean a living wage, a pension, a health plan and no stop-loss order for your kid to stay in Iraq. It means guns and cops and lots of flag-wagging.

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“Real Security” calls for Democrats to hinge the 2006 campaign on how the Republicans have failed us on the issue of national security. Harry Reid says Democrats should wrap themselves in the flag, have tanks as backdrop and then try to outflank the GOP from the right with demands for increased military funding, a better-fought war, tighter borders and ports run by white, American-born Christians, preferably free of radical organizers from the ILWU.

As reported in the Washington Times, Reid’s strategy memo advises: “Ensure that you have the proper U.S. and state flags at the event, and consider finding someone to sing the national anthem and lead the group in the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the event.” Next up was Joe Biden, standing between two gold-fringed flags, and probably with Old Glory underwear, telling the press that “to the extent that Bush fails in Iraq, American interests are seriously damaged, and I’m rooting for his success, not his failure.” This is the man who explained his twenty-minute opening speech at the Alito hearings by saying he wanted to put the nominee at ease.

So what are we looking at down the road in the next year or two? A bunch of national Democrats like Hillary Clinton screaming about illegal immigrants and voting to fund a wall running from Corpus Christi to San Diego, staffed by Israeli death squads. If the war gets mentioned at all, it’ll be back to the old winning Kerry formula: We’ll fight it better. They’ll be drawing up Patriot Act III, plus new national ID cards and cameras on every street corner, just like the ones they’re installing in Britain.

Feingold will make a great showing in the early primaries, then get creamed by the Democratic machine. He’ll give a powerful speech at the convention, pledging allegiance to the candidate.

The Republicans will probably win again. Good luck to them. Who wants Democrats to get in, just to run a better police state, the way Blair and New Labour have in Britain, where, last time I looked, the government was planning to gas every badger from Lands End to Cape Wrath?

Who wants Democrats to get in to run a better Empire? In the Bush years Latin America is seeing a new dawn, with Hugo Chavez publicly deriding our Commander in Chief as a drunkard and sending cheap heating oil to the poor in the Northeast. In the Bush years two professors, from Harvard and the University of Chicago, have published an eighty-three-page paper outlining exactly why slavish deference to the Israel lobby is hurting America. I don’t think that would have happened in Clinton’s time. At some level, there’s a lot to be said for having morons in charge–at least until the sort of people I was talking to last Saturday can organize a party to take over, and start the long business of returning the country to sanity. Feingold should make a break for it now, split like La Follette and really stir things up. God knows, we need it.

Alexander CockburnAlexander Cockburn, The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language.
After two years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, he worked at the New Left Review and The New Statesman, and co-edited two Penguin volumes, on trade unions and on the student movement.
A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years for The Village Voice about the press and politics. Since then he has contributed to many publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal (where he had a regular column from 1980 to 1990), as well as alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

He has written "Beat the Devil" since 1984.

He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St Clair, of the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch(http://www.counterpunch.org) which have a substantial world audience. In 1987 he published a best-selling collection of essays, Corruptions of Empire, and two years later co-wrote, with Susanna Hecht, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (both Verso). In 1995 Verso also published his diary of the late 80s, early 90s and the fall of Communism, The Golden Age Is In Us. With Ken Silverstein he wrote Washington Babylon; with Jeffrey St. Clair he has written or coedited several books including: Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press; The Politics of Anti-Semitism; Imperial Crusades; Al Gore, A User's Manual; Five Days That Shook the World; and A Dime's Worth of Difference, about the two-party system in America.